Why Is The Crypto Market Up Today?

The global cryptocurrency market is booming today as the overall market cap now sits at just under $1.85 trillion – up by more than 3% in the last 24 hours. 

Let’s take a look at some of the tokens and events that have performed particularly well in this period, as well as some of the latest market developments.

Bitcoin (BTC) retakes $45,000

One of the biggest contributors to the bullish uptick in the market is BTC, which has now retaken the $45,000 level and is pushing upwards of $46,000 at the time of writing, gaining some 4.37% in the last 24 hours.

This comes after a month of bearish conditions following the landmark decision on 11 January 2024 to approve spot BTC exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States.

For the majority of 2023, BTC floated between the $20,000 and $30,000 price tags before experiencing a strong rally in October that pushed it above $40,000. In the wake of the ETF decision, it appears that BTC underwent a brief price correction, briefly dropping below $40,000.

Now traders eagerly await to see if the premier crypto can push past the $50,000 resistance, and perhaps kick off a much-needed bull run.

ERC-404 renews ETH momentum

The Ethereum (ETH) token has relished in some solid gains following the release of the experimental (and unofficial) ERC-404 Ethereum token standard from the Pandora project.

ETH is presently trading up at $2,463, marking an almost 6.7% gain over the last week. In the last 24 hours alone, ETH has added $5billion to its market cap, which sits at just over $295bn.

With growing pressure from institutional investors to spot ETH ETFs approved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the ETH token could rally further throughout 2024.

ERC-404?

According to data from CoinGecko, the ERC-404 token category has seen hundreds of millions added to its overall market cap, which presently sits at over $350bn.

Evidently, there remains a healthy appetite for cutting-edge innovation amongst market participants, and the rather curious capabilities of this new standard could see even more fresh capital enter the market.

What is ERC-404? Well, the Ethereum network is home to two major token standards. Firstly there is ERC-20 which are fungible tokens, and ERC-721 which are non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and ERC-404 is an unofficial experimental token standard that is a combination of both.

ERC-404 tokens were designed so it was possible to make “an NFT with fractionalization and liquidity”. For example, an ERC-404 contract mints both the NFT and token simultaneously at a preset ratio, projects leverage these tokens can create liquidity pools to reduce NFT trading friction and boost liquidity, an issue that frequently troubles NFT markets.

Though that is far from all it’s capable of. In the coming days and weeks, we’ll hear much more about ERC-404 and the projects building on it, which could bring much-needed innovation to the NFT space. 

Pandora (PANDORA)

Pandora, a project that launched the ERC-404 token standard, and is the first to create this type of token, has relished in extraordinary gains since going live on 2 February, rising from a price of around $4,300 to almost $33,000 in a week.

Solana’s $2billion boost

Rising star Solana (SOL) has added almost $2bn to its market cap despite another major outage on 6 February 2024 which at the time prompted concern from market observers. In the last 24 hours, Solana’s market cap has risen from around $44bn to just over $46bn, suggesting that there is still plenty of confidence in the Web3 competitor.

After a brief knee-jerk reaction to the mainnet outage which pushed the token price down to around $93, the SOL token is has recovered and once again pressed passed the $100 mark, and currently trading at $105.10, up 3.35% in the last 24 hours.